Tag: human-rights

After watching the immoral flood the capitol to protest equality, I feel it entirely appropriate to co-opt one of their signs:

Don’t lie to children.

Really. DON’T LIE TO CHILDREN. Stop the hypocrisy now.

If we were truly concerned with children not having two parents of opposing genders, single mothers and single fathers would not be left in charge of their children. If we were truly concerned with the sanctity of marriage, we would not even entertain the idea of divorce being legal.

We are not talking of currency that will lose value from inflation and being over-printed–we are talking about the quality of life for our fellow Americans.

This is to the little girl who testified that same-sex marriage would take one of her parents away:

I’m so, so sorry your parents have brainwashed you. We are not trying to say your family is any less valid because it’s one man, one woman, and one precious little life, and we are not trying to remove any of your parents from your life; what we are asking is that we have the right to form our own families. I hope you never grow up to feel left out, that you never feel alone. I hope your days are long and full of joy; truly, I do. However, there are people out there, men who love men and women who love women, and in between that is a whole broad, beautiful spectrum of adults who love one another. THAT IS THE TRUTH. All we want is the chance to commit to one another for the rest of their lives in the same manner your parents did.

The need of the majority to discriminate should not be allowed to trump the rights of the minority who simply want to be given the same chance at having that white picket fence, three car garage, and two and a half kids. There are enough children waiting to find homes, literally starving with the hope that one day, someone or a pair of someones will love them just for existing. These children are tired of looking in through the windows at the happy family sitting down to dinner by the fire; they deserve the right to be welcomed in out of the cold. How dare these falsely pious call themselves followers of God or Christ if they are comfortable allowing innocent children to suffer needlessly because they as adults cannot accept people who are different from them.

Marriage is not just the act of having a ceremony presided over by a holy man, it is the union of two individuals in the eyes of a greater, more earthly power: a court of law. We do not live by the holy code of Leviticus, and we do not live under Sharia law. We live under the Constitution and Bill of Rights. We live under the Declaration o f Independence, independent of religious law and in the good graces of secularism. Nobody is going to force any religious institution to do something that violates their beliefs; just as no religion should be allowed to violate the rights of a person not of their belief. You can keep us away from the altar of the falsely pious, but you cannot keep us away from the altar of love.

We have come so far in nearly 400 years, and yet we seem to still be right where we were when we came here. Howdare we call ourselves a civilized nation when we treat our own so barbarically. How dare we.

TAKE ACTION TODAY! Tell your legislators, your governor, and everyone in your community that the time for marriage equality is NOW!

Like this:

I am a gender-breaking individual, and I feel this is the one time I can speak for my community of all gender-varying peoples without excusing myself for doing so.

Stop abandoning us and leaving us behind. We need protection, and nothing is more irritating or blood-boiling than those who falsely claim to be for “full LGBT rights” yet really mean “just LG rights”. This is where I stop speaking for anyone other than myself, because I am not a voice for the masses unless they say I am. I am only a voice for myself and those who stand behind me. I don’t know who they are, and I claim no following.

That out of the way, I’d like to focus for a moment on one of our most at-risk populations: students. This is to the Aurora County School Board in Illinois first and foremost due to their fish-out-of-water stance on trans- protection: Stop flip-flopping and get back in the right pond and protect students who often cannot protect themselves. Numbers have floated around varying that anywhere between 40 to over 50% of transgender youth attempting suicide before age 20. It is not unheard of for those as young as 7 to make an attempt on their own lives to escape a world that refuses to see them as they are. Worse, there is a total global population suicide rate of 31% to 50% (depending who in the community you speak to, and which surveys you use). These numbers don’t come from nowhere. Nobody has ever woken up one day and said to themselves ‘man I’m bored, let’s try suicide!’. Nobody wants to die, it is hard-wired in to us. When one runs out of coping mechanisms, when they no longer know how to deal with the pain they are facing, it is only then that suicide is the next step. What sickens me to my core is that we allow people to walk that plank by our own cruelty and indifference.

By flip-flopping on issues, by being lazy and half-assed on a stance, we are allowing children to come to harm for no other reason than they dare to be themselves. We all must stand up and say ‘enough is enough and too much is too much,” we must draw a line and say ‘this far, no further.” We seem too content to allow groups that we are not a part of to be pushed to the side, marginalized, and walked upon with cruel disregard to their lives. Worse, this ass-backwards sense of communal isolationism means that groups for whom few stand and fight for are allowed to be persecuted and taunted, humiliated and shamed with almost no rebuttal or swift retribution.

The moment a self-proclaimed ‘loving, tolerant’ monotheist group screams that their rights are being infringed upon, we feel obligated to back down even if it means allowing hate and bigotry to continue to thrive. I am a Religious Humanist and I acknowledge that religion is an intricate part of humanity; it has been since we habitated caves. We cannot deny the aspect of us that yearns to believe in something higher than us tending to the light at the end of the tunnel, but maybe, like Dr. Thompson once said, that was the folly of the acid junkies of the 70’s. At no time should someone’s personal religious views or narrow-minded ideologies be allowed to infringe upon the happiness and lives of another group.

I know it may sound hypocritical to those who don’t understand things like ‘compassion’ and ‘consent,’ but when I speak out against those speaking out against us, I am not trying to silence them. Simply I am saying keep your hateful views, but keep them privately behind closed doors where you say our lives belong. Happiness is also an intricate, intrinsic part of humanity and the human condition and should never, under any circumstances, be abridged for anyone.

(Though I understand where people like that come from. Before I accepted myself, before I fully embraced who I am, while I still ran from the truths I had been taught were undesirable, I too was a hateful bastard. I hated seeing people happy doing what I only wished I could do.)

This bullying comes from us and passed on to the next generation. When we say faggot to each other in public, that’s where kids learn it. They see us hurl it as an insult, they hear us say “that’s so gay” in scorn at a situation we don’t like and correlate “gay” with “undesirable.” When it’s children against children it’s called bullying, when adults do it to each other it’s business as usual. We ourselves are passing on the demons that haunt us to the next generation.